14 Obituary Notice. 



all members of this Society, Only a year ago he was 

 appointed Curator of the Arboretum, and to the laying out 

 of its grounds he was devoting himself at the time of his 

 decease. 



John Sadler was a born naturalist. Gifted with talents 

 of a high order, his early life was well adapted for the de- 

 velopment of his natural instincts, and the opportunities 

 he had were not thrown away. In his later life he loved 

 to dwell on his rambles when a boy in the neighbourhood 

 of Bridge of Earn — (of the flora of which he afterwards 

 published an account) — and the love of nature thus early 

 cultivated remained with him through life. As a botanist, 

 Sadler laid claim to be no philosopher. His sphere was 

 not tljat of abstract morphological or physiological pro- 

 blems, — his education did not fit him in that way. But 

 he was a practical botanist ; one who knew plants ; one 

 who had a marvellously keen, critical, and diagnostic power ; 

 and, having an innate love for plants which had led him 

 in quest of them in their native haunts all over Scotland, 

 his experience and knowledge made him at the time of his 

 death one of the first of Scottish botanists. There are few 

 who possessed so extensive a knowledge of Scottish plants, 

 both flowering and flowerless, as he ; for it was one of 

 the features of his acquaintance with plants that it was not 

 limited to one section only of the vegetable kingdom, but 

 mosses, fungi, algae, lichens, as well as flowering plants, 

 were all equally well known by him. His was a know- 

 ledge largely bred of experience, and of a kind no amount 

 of book or laboratory work can create ; of a kind, too, that 

 cannot be measured by published records; indeed, on look- 

 ing over the list of his publications, one cannot but feel a 

 shade of disappointment that so much information, the 

 accumulation of a lifetime, should pass away in one indi- 

 vidual leaving so slight a record behind, and the loss that 

 Scottish botanists feel at his death will not be lessened the 

 more remote that event becomes. His discoveries of new 

 stations for plants are numerous, and his name will be 

 perpetuated by several new species, of which perhaps the 

 most notable is the small Scottish willow (Salix Sadleri) 

 found by him on the cliffs above Loch Chander. 



By his social qualities John Sadler will ever be remem- 



